Towards a Carnivalesque Body(?)
Acting-movement Research workshop
Inspired by the historical form of the carnival and its radical relationship to the body, this workshop explores, expand and critically reflect on the boundaries of the nature of affects, passions and actions within theatrical composition and performing.
Carnival, as described by Mikhail Bakhtin, temporarily suspends the prohibitions and hierarchies that regulate social life, giving way to a kind of counterculture. It opens a space where the body exceeds itself, where laughter, contradiction, hyperbolism and disorder challenge institutional structures and dominant representation.
What means that today in the context of culture, art market and politics?
Through a series of open-ended instructions, tasks, and discussions, participants will engage with: body-based practices, movement and acting exploration, working with text, sound, and random objects by means of relational encounters, individual and collective improvisation.
We will work and reflect on themes such as: laughter, excess, and hyperbole, disharmony and upside down, the sacred and the profane, affect and being affected, being a body vs. having a body, etc.
Simultaneously and in this framework, Carnival operates as a critical space that interrogate the contemporary conditions beyond the good and the bad, beyond ideology and discourses, opening up some questions, like:
What might counterculture mean today, within and beyond institutional frameworks?
To who belong the carnivalesque world now?
Is there still a social need for subversion? Could the performing arts provide a space for it – or are we just talking about playful activity and ideological discourses among friends and a trendy market?
Where can ethics be situated in a carnivalesque practice?
Keywords: Rabelais, Popular Culture, Bakhtin, immanence, grotesque,
Spinoza, art institutions.